What’s Happening Now?

I’d like to give you an update on what’s happening with CodeIgniter.  2.0’s code has been stable and in use by ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor for many months, and the code has been publicly available at Bitbucket for awhile as well.  But the official download and released version is still at 1.7.2.  That will soon change, CodeIgniter 2.0 will be released, and forward development will return to regularity.

CodeIgniter has always been born from ExpressionEngine, both in terms of its code as well as its very ability to exist, since the commercial arm of EllisLab provides the resources necessary to maintain an open source framework and surrounding community.  That is still the case, so to gauge what’s happening with CodeIgniter, you can often look to ExpressionEngine.

Particularly relevant to CodeIgniter are the recent blog posts on the ExpressionEngine blog: Acknowledge, Identify, React, and I Hear You.  Additionally, Leslie Camacho (President), Leslie Doherty (Community Architect), Lisa Wess (Director of Community Services), and myself (CTO) appeared on a recent episode of the EE Podcast, talking about changes being made to the company, our development practices, as well as how we communicate with our users.  I encourage you to read both of those blog posts and listen to the EE Podcast, even if you have no interest in ExpressionEngine.  I promise that you will not find any marketing speak trying to push you to our commercial product.

So what happens from here?

• We are still interviewing for the open Software Engineer position to expand our team, which will make it easier for us to allocate real resources to CodeIgniter development.
• Our adoption of agile development practices will help us quickly wrap up 2.0, and finally put it in your hands in a meaningful way, and get on with iterative improvements.
• Along the way, we will be actively working on communicating short and long term plans for the framework to you effectively so that CodeIgniter’s direction and what’s being worked on is no longer a mystery to you.
• The Community Chieftain position has not accomplished what was intended when it was created, so we are suspending it in favor of finding more effective ways of interfacing with the community.
• We still love Mercurial.  In fact, Bitbucket was recently acquired by Atlassian, which is good for us, and good for CodeIgniter.  This injection of talent and infrastructure into our chosen public source code host bodes well for additional features and improved workflows, particularly in terms of making it easier to accept community contributions.

There are good times ahead, and as long as PHP remains a dominant force in the industry, CodeIgniter will still be the lightweight well-documented framework of choice by developers for whom performance, simplicity, and security are of paramount importance to their livelihood.

Posted by Derek Jones on October 26, 2010